I am out of the loop with the industry, but I thought many people were using cloud agents and controlling them through tmux or something. But yeah I guess that also means you don't have access to do much.
I don't think that's phrased correctly. What corporate it does is set policies. Often those policies disable virtualisation. (They don't disable sandboxing - that's used in many ways and security loves that) But if the business need is to run LLM agents safely, the policies will be changed to dictate how to run agents safely.
Many teams use them to make sure that the coding environment is consistent, and they are well accepted in many corporate environments as a result.
But they are a good way of firewalling agents away from files and resources that one must be able to demonstrate that the agents did not and could not have access to.
You can certainly imagine very senior and powerful traders at GS demanding it. I'd be only slightly surprised to find that GS allowed it. The traders would have had more power than the IT people trying to forbid it.